Access to Knowledge
Technicalities 43(4) July/Aug 2034: 11- 14
“Information” and “knowledge” are two of those squirrely words that lay at the center of our profession but are difficult to define. But most of us in the field of librarianship know what it is that we do day to day, and so the question of “what is information?” is resolvable in practice. While we define our work as an “information service” or “providing access to knowledge” (amongst other various formulations), we create and maintain collections and provide access to them, and for us that becomes our pragmatic definition of “information”—it is what is found in our collections.
I like this way of defining information. It is much more satisfying than trying to define information as a phenomenon under scientific study. The less restrictive general scholarly approaches are best when they try to look at how the word is used by various disciplines. This was the approach of Machlup and Mansfield1 in 1983 which resulted in a big thick book compiling how systems engineers, astronomers and others including librarians use the term. The result is that the word has several different meanings, often used in specific applications, without reference to a general concept, and that compiling those definitions together results (surprise!) in a very expansive domain of phenomena. Another approach is used by Jonathan Furner to find that various disciplines deploy synonyms for information (e.g., for academic librarianship it might be “books and journal, et cetera” or perhaps “documents” in the European tradition) and that perhaps we could just forego the word entirely. Turns out in the additive process of compiling definitions, everything is information; in the subtractive approach, information is nothing.
What’s Wrong with Being Pragmatic?
It is important to note that all our examples above use a pragmatic approach to define “information.” That means looking at how the word is used in human interactions, and is shaped by context. Two librarians talking about “access to information” might understand each other perfectly well, and two systems engineers likewise when they use that phrase; what is not clear is whether a librarian and systems engineer might be talking about different things and are perhaps misunderstanding each other when they engage on the topic. Pragmatics—and being attentive to them—help us realize we might be dividing up the world in different ways.
Another problem with pragmatics, especially for a term that alternately references everything and nothing, is that is blinds us to things that might qualify as “information” but we have tacitly excluded in our professional daily practice. Jazz music and pornography seem to be inhabitants of the universe of information, perhaps even in the way librarians talk about it, but are not included typically in our library collections. Ron DeSantis and the politicians of Florida might be surprised by that in their explicit desire to vilify librarians as culture warriors, but also that debate almost certainly comes down to how one defines “pornography” and we are already in the middle of one word definition problem here, so we will leave that aside. The crux is that librarians may be excluding certain kinds of information that even by the rules of their game they might collect. Librarians do well in coordinating amongst themselves (e.g. “who is collecting all the publications of southeast Asian government publications?”) and special collections and archivists, especially in the burgeoning interest for community-based collections.
But as we move away from text and traditional print, we lose clarity about who is supposed to collect what, with gaps opening up in the realm of information. The loss of twentieth century silent studio movies is a major example of an unstable medium paired with a lack of a coordinated and comprehensive collection plan. We have a substantial collection of Mary Pickford’s films because she very deliberately worked with film archives. Over 100,000 audio master tapes of major recordings such as were lost in a fire at the Universal Music Group archives, including labels received through corporate acquisitions, such as the Chess masters of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. UMG disputes this, but then again, we may never know what was lost. While music most certainly counts as “information”, we have decided to treat these cultural treasures as private corporate “intellectual property”, where preservation and access are not guaranteed by a commitment to stewardship but rather subjected to a logic of cost versus profit.
Digital: Pragmatical but not Practical?
The digital realm provides a challenge as well, as physical objects such as books, compact discs and digital video discs are increasingly available online. Lending digital books has to some degree upset the balance of power and spending between publishers and libraries, but so far forced restrictive user agreements and intellectual property rights software has not caused us librarians to rethink the nature of information. And copyright law has so far permitted us to make digital copies of physical books and DVDs for preservation purposes and even to make them available online in limited ways.
But the market for physical discs is getting smaller. Studios now distribute films directly to audiences via streaming, cutting libraries out of the service of making films available to the public. This has a direct impact on our pragmatic definition of “information.” If information is what we collect, then what happens when we no longer have physical or even digital copies of films? We will not even have the opportunity to collect that material. That casts studios as the sole purveyor of guaranteeing the future existence of those materials, and they have a markedly uneven record of accomplishment since Edison opened the first film studio in 1893.
The loss of access to materials made available only by streaming might not take years of medium decomposition, corporate bankruptcy or collective forgetfulness. IndieWire indicates that the conversion of the streaming service HBO Max to Max will result in the removal of 81 titles due to corporate merger.2 As my student Glen Sturgeon stated, it included shows that have no outlet anywhere else, and no physical analogs. The producers and artists for the animated series Infinity Train were not notified that their show was purged from the original broadcaster Cartoon Network, the HBO Max streaming service, along with official tweets about the show and even the soundtrack disappeared from music streaming services. The artists and producers did not retain physical copies even in archival form, so apparently it is gone, except for some archival stream locked away in a private corporate vault, and the company is not responding to inquiries about the show. There is speculation that the show was eliminated as a tax write off. So not only are libraries unable to perform their role as protectors and guardians of cultural production, we are actually paying for the purging of this show as American citizens. It is down the memory hole. Films are made available on the sole basis of their immediate commercial value to the corporation that owns it.
It is usually at this point in such conversations that someone objects and says they found the show on some pirated video website or peer-to-peer file sharing system. Glen Sturgeon notes that pirated copies, in addition to their dubious legal status, are often incomplete, lack documentation about their technical processes and editing histories, and lack the provenance typically associated with archival copies that among other things establishes the authenticity of the film and describes what versions are available. Libraries not only collect information, they deliver user experiences, and among those are maintaining the epistemic authority of the collected documents and doing so within legal frameworks.
Why the concern with a pragmatic definition of information, and a concern for its shortcomings? Scholarly attempts to define information often feel scholastic and even unreal, and sometimes favor far-fetched abstractions untempered by actual practice. Librarians know what information is—it is what we collect. But it is useful to lift our sights to consider what other forms of information are out there. There may be uncollected sources of information that warrant collection and preservation. There are also threats of territorial incursion that make our work more difficult. Both involve the development and invocation of a professional responsibility that librarians guarantee the collection, preservation and access of our culture and knowledge, like an American Civil Liberties Union for documents and ideas.
What is Access?
And, as with information and knowledge, among other terms, we have the same concerns about access to information. Having promoted a pragmatic definition of “information” and noting its shortcomings, the same problem exists for “access.” It can refer very broadly to a range of activities, including even mundane operations like folding and putting away one’s socks. Judging from the number of unmatched orphans in my dresser, this is actually a substantial problem.
As before, we know what it is that we do as librarians when we provide access to collections: we catalog. We have standards that we have designed and those standards to varying degrees are a component of our professional training and practice. We interact with publishers of indexes and bibliographies to periodical literature, many of whom share our training and practice. We have acquired their bibliographies, and to varying degrees have incorporated them into our practice and even directly into our catalogs. We have similarly interacted with the publishers of research journals and incorporated their digital access services into our practices and sometimes into our catalogs. We have partnered with scholars, publishers, government and funding agencies to develop standards that assist them and us in our work, such as the Document Object Identifier, citation practices, International Standard Book Numbers, the Research Organization Registry, Cataloging-in-Publication data, or author identifiers like the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. Access, as we define it pragmatically within librarianship, is cataloging. And we include adjacent operations like the construction and maintenance of standards, and data sources like authority files and ORCID. Ranging a little further but still in the ballpark of cataloging are activities like finding aids in special collections and metadata standards that have application in libraries and beyond.
The Organization of Knowledge
But as with information, we need to raise our sights to see what other means of access to information exist out there, and not be overly defined by our own specific practices of the moment. This is where I prefer to use the term knowledge organization, or “KO” for short. KO includes cataloging, and for some it is predominantly about cataloging, though perhaps that might include historical analyses of cataloging or a philosophical analytic of the assumptions and commitments that we make in cataloging. The International Society for Knowledge Organization, ISKO, more or less excels in this area. It has combined various traditions, from American cataloging to the British Classification Research Group, to more European documentalist approaches, and also has strong Asian and South American representations as well, some of which are quite critical of all of the above. Its high notes are quite strong, its low notes are like bad cataloging.
KO can and should, but sometimes fails, to identify all the methods of access to information that are used out there in the world. So, cataloging has a role. But so do search engines, and personal organizational systems, and book reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, reading groups and social networks. What are all the different ways that people use to search and access information? An expanded pragmatic definition of access is not just what librarians do to make information accessible, but all the methods that people over the world do to access information in a broad and inclusive way.
An ethical professional approach to information service like librarianship should not only be concerned with its own operations but also how information is used within other kinds of institutional and social settings. If we are dedicated as protectors of intellectual freedom and of equality of access to information, then we must also be concerned with ethical and unbiased access to as it operates in all spheres of society. Search engines and social media have shown themselves to be popular methods of access, but for their technical sophistication they are also biased and secretive. Generative AI is likely to play a similar role. A KO perspective, as opposed to one dedicated to cataloging alone, shows that access is a site of social and cultural control. Librarians cannot be content by eliminating bias solely in our own systems, but we must conceptualize access as a multifaceted and integrated series of social operations, whose fairness is guaranteed by librarians, scholars and other kinds of information professionals.
Works Cited
1. Machlup, Fritz, and Una Mansfield. 1983. The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. New York: Wiley. doi: 10.1086/601595.
2. Foreman, Alison and Wilson Chapman. 2023. “87 Titles Unceremoniously Removed from HBO Max.” Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/removed-hbo-max-movies-shows-warner-bros-discovery-merger-list/close-enough-2/ . Accessed May 14, 2023.